His Answer
by Little Obsessions
Summary: "Their world seems to expand and contract simultaneously, and Robert Crawley is reminded that he is a very small man, who is witnessing the evil capriciousness of nature."


**This carries significant content warnings for graphic description of a miscarriage. If this would trigger you in any way, I suggest you don't read it. **

* * *

He has always been in the habit of underestimating her. So many times, throughout the course of their union, he has underestimated her steel, her resilience, her quiet grit.

Now all of that is washed away in a sudden surge, a desperate need to protect her.

He is still breathless from his frantic climb of the stairs after an untypically ruffled Mrs Hughes chased him out onto the lawn. He had trailed mud from his galoshes, the rain having suddenly availed itself on the estate, the entire length of the carpet and the treads on the stair, and into the more delicate pale carpets of the bedroom they pretend not to share.

And then her washroom, and he was stopped short by the contrast. The blood curling out into water, diluting itself lighter and lighter and lighter still as it spreads its long, grasping fingers across the chequerboard tiles and marks them scarlet.

O'Brian is kneeling beside her, and he is reminded – in an absurd twist of his own conscious – of Raphael's Mary Magdalen, kneeling before her slaughtered Christ. There are unintelligible sounds coming from both of them; his wife's pleading, dreadful keening, a wounded, desperate animal. Her maid; futile attempts at comfort, mumbling useless consolations, hands trying to pick her up from the pool of vermillion seeping out from between her fingers and between her legs.

There is so much blood.

It makes his stomach curdle and vomit pushes its way into his throat almost instantly; the smell is such a remarkably individual one, transporting him across raging seas and boyish patriotism to the African War, and he curls his fingers so tightly into his own palms that his nails prick the skin there.

He tampers down the worst of his instincts, and as he strides towards her his feet splash through the water and the blood and he kneels down and feels it warm his skin through his trousers.

She is so consumed, so present in her own absolute agony, that she hasn't even registered his presence.

"Cora, my love…"

She glances up, as if shocked that he is there, and her eyes are so unfathomably pained that he has to resist every urge, in every fibre of his being, to look away. Never in all his time as a soldier, a man, a husband, a father, an Earl, has he witnessed such prodigious pain in someone's eyes.

The very fact that those eyes belong to the woman he loves is enough to wind him, and he feels it physically when he realises the true depth of what his happening.

"Robert…" she removes her hands from where it has bunched a once white sheet into a tight ball of fresh, vivid blood, from the apex of her thighs, and holds out her hand as if to explain to him what has happened, as if some clarification might help remedy the pain.

He realises she is still entirely naked save for the linen he assumes O'Brien has draped over her, and he wants to weep with her and for her and for their thorough vulnerability in that moment. But he dares not; he dares not take this unintelligible pain and give it freedom to strike him down right there.

"O'Brien," he says, his voice splitting over the words in a way even he does not recognise. He has never heard his own voice so weak, "fetch Doctor Clarkson immediately."

O'Brien rises to her feet, her glassy eyes still trained intently on Cora, and goes, silently, the only noise her feet splashing through the future he has so desperately coveted.

That, he tells himself, as his wife returns her hand between her legs in a futile gesture of defiance, has always been his hubris.

She is openly sobbing, and he does not know what to do, apart from hold her and pray he can steer them through this horrendous dream. He pulls her against him, and the linen clings to her as she screams wildly into his chest, and he notices the curve of her abdomen and how he has failed to appreciate it until now.

When she had told him; shocked as he was, delighted as he was, he took it for granted that they would reach, unscathed, the end – as they had with the other three.

He sees now, how foolish that assumption had been.

Her wailing continues, and he can only loiter at the fringes of her agony, hoping to share a shred of her sadness, taste a little of her bitterness. He does not know how long they sit there, rocking on the bathroom floor, her back cradled to his chest as he holds her as if she is his captive, the water and blood growing colder and colder as it soaks entirely through his trousers.

Time has ceased to matter.

"It's…Robert," she weeps softly, pleading, squeezing her legs closed so tightly he feels her muscles contract in her back and in her rear. "It's coming."

It takes him a painfully long second to understand what she means.

Then horror, so real it is almost tangible, sets in and he wants to flee. He wants to leave her in that moment, because he cannot bear witness to this aberrant inversion of the natural order. One is not supposed to witness their child's death, in any universe, in any state of being.

He cannot leave, he knows, he must not.

And it strikes him as bitterly unfair that this is the only birth he will ever witness, and at the end they will have nothing but sadness to cradle between them.

"My love," he says softly, against her pale – almost blue, clammy – skin, glistening with tears, and blood, and misery, "let it – the baby – let it go."

She tips her head back against his shoulder and though he is holding her, though he can feel her and see her, she leaves the washroom and him and goes somewhere he does not know and cannot access, and she sobs just once and then cries out like a wounded animal, tearing a scar so visceral across his consciousness that he will never forget the noise as long as he draws breath.

Their world seems to expand and contract simultaneously, and Robert Grantham is reminded that he is a very small man, who is witnessing the evil capriciousness of nature.

And, just as he is experiencing that, he is experience the power of a woman who looks so delicate in the light of day, and is made of steel when he peels away the layers his expectations have dressed her in.

She sinks against him, sobs returning, and he does not know what to do. He can't entertain the idea of lifting the linen sheet, and he does not think she would want him to because her cries are so fierce and so raw that he doesn't imaging laying eyes on their child will help at all.

He is grateful, then, in that moment, for Clarkson entering with the calm urgency he has always had at the birth of Robert's children. Though even he stops short at the sight of all the blood.

Their eyes meet, and Robert relives their conversation from just a few weeks ago; his own giddiness, his own sense of masculine propriety overriding his desire to understand his wife's body, his own hope all come flooding back to him. And Clarkson's cool explanations that he couldn't really hear over his own burning desires.

The only thing pressing Robert during that conversation;_ what gender will it be_?

Not _will it live? Will it force me to bear witness to a moment so painful I might never breath easily again? _

_Will it take the woman I love and raise her onto a pedestal, while simultaneously making me see her in all her raw humanity? _

He supposes now, as he stares at the scarlet linen between his wife's legs, and she sobs and Clarkson checks her pulse, he has his answer.


End file.
